The Arabic language is more than fifteen centuries old and it remains one of the most spoken languages in the world. It is the mother tongue of more than 400 million people and among over a billion Muslims in the world, it has an added significance as the language of Quran. The first question that continues to arise among the lovers of languages and linguists is: how many words does Arabic actually have? The response is truly mind-blowing.
How did the Arabic Language come into being?
Arabic belongs to Semitic language family that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, and Amharic. It developed out of the Arabian Peninsula, where nomadic tribes spoke the early forms of the language long before the Islam was ever in existence. The earliest Arabic texts we have discovered are some inscriptions in the 4th century CE, but the spoken language is surely at least older.
The actual game-changer was in the 7 th century, when the Quran came in classical Arabic. The language had suddenly come to play a cohesive role in an empire that spanned to the entirety of Spain to Persia. It was then that Classical Arabic or Fusha as it is presently written emerged as the standardized written form used throughout the Arab world today. Since then, the Arabic language has been used as a language of scientists, philosophers, doctors and poets in centuries. Its morphological composition enabled it to create new words with remarkable efficiency and this is a large portion of the reason why Arabic lexicon would eventually become one of the largest ever documented.
Arabs Arabic Language: How many words in Arabic language?
And here is the great question. The Arabic language is linguistically estimated to have between 12 million and 18 million words, but that varies with the definition of word in the unique system of Arabic. Lisan al-Arab, a collection of dictionaries compiled in the 13th century by Ibn Manzur, contains approximately 80,000 root-forms on its own, each of which may in turn lead to dozens of derivatives.
Some little things worth knowing:
The entire Arabic vocabulary is estimated to exceed 12 million words, which is one of the rich languages in human history.
One three-letter root may produce 200 words.
Classical Arabic is said to contain over 400 words describing a lion and over 1,000 words describing a camel.
The one used in news and in schools, known as Modern Standard Arabic, is drawn out of this huge reservoir, and remains practical to use in everyday life.
And top of all that, the dialects of the Arab world have their own thousands of colloquialisms you will never find in any of the classical dictionaries.
There are a lot of Arabic Words in English.
This is what most people are not aware of: Hundreds of words of Arabic have been quietly borrowed by English. In the medieval era, the language of the state-of-the-art knowledge, math, science, philosophy, etc., was Arabic and European scholars borrowed Arabic words into the Latin which later trickled into English. Algebra, algorithm, alcohol, almanac, cipher, and zenith among others are words of Arabic origin. Even cotton, sofa and sugar were named in Arabic origin. It is a very impressive credit to the extent to which Arabic-speaking civilizations determined the intellectual world.
Basic Arabic Words
In case you want to know more about the language, some of the common words can provide you with a nice introduction:
Marhaba (مرحبا) — Hello
Shukran (شكراً) — Thank you
Na’am (نعم) — Yes
La (لا) — No
Min fadlak (من فضلك) — Please
Arabic Times Words.
Arabic is known to have an unexpectedly good vocabulary to describe time:
Al-yawm (اليوم) — Today
Ghadan (غداً) — Tomorrow
Ams (أمس) — Yesterday
Al-Sa 7a(السa 7a) — The hour / The time.
Al-mustaqbal (المستقبل) — The future
Arabic Places Words.
Some place-related Arabic terms have found their way to the rest of the world:
Madinah (مدينة) — City
Bayt (بيت) — House
Souq (سوق) — Market
Jami’a (جامعة) — University
Sahara (صحراء) — Desert (you already know this one)
Words of Things in Arabic.
The most beautiful Arabic names are given to everyday objects:
Kitab (كتاب) — Book
Qalam (قلم) — Pen
Sayara (سيارة) — Car
Hatif (هاتف) — Telephone
Tawila (طاولة) — Table
Arabic Terms of People.
The Arabic language also possesses considerate terms of people and relations:
Walid (والد) — Father
Walida (والدة) — Mother
Sadiq (صديق) — Friend
Rajul (رجل) — Man
Mar’a (مرأة) — Woman
Also read about: how do you say in Arabic i love you
Why Does Arabic Have a Million Words?
The Arabic vocabulary is not a coincidence, it is the logical outcome of the way the language is constructed. Arabic literature about a root system, in which nearly every word is expanded out of a three-letter root. By adding or removing vowel patterns around that root, one can get an entire family of related words. Here is the motivation behind the sheer volume:
Root-based morphology: Consider the root K-T-B that is associated with writing. Out of it comes kitab (book), katib (writer), maktab (office), and maktaba (library) -that is but the tip of the iceberg.
An extremely lengthy written history: Over 1,500 years of poetry, theology, science, and literature continue to pile up.
Cultural accuracy: Traditionally, the Arabic speakers had to use a very specific domain in their vocabulary related to the desert life, life in the tribes, and religion. The need of subtleties drove the language to formulate truly subtle differences.
Borrowing correctly: Arabic did not simply borrow Persian, Greek and Turkish words, it assimilated them and adapted them by its own rules.
Preservation of religion: Since Classical Arabic is associated with the Quran, it did not experience the same type of death that would have reduced the vocabulary with time.
Also read about: all prepositions in Arabic
How Many Words Are There in the English Language Compared to the Arabic Language?
English is often given much credit in terms of its vocabulary being the largest in the world. Oxford English Dictionary contains approximately 600,000 entries and with obsolete and technical ones added, there are cases where the estimates go up to a million. That is impressive enough until you see the Arabic numbers.
In their daily lives an average Arabic speaker may use 10,000 to 15,000 words daily, whereas an educated English speaker only uses about 15,000 to 20,000 words. But the theoretical upper limit of Arabic? It is in an entirely different league.
Also read about: how to say god bless you in Arabic
How many Arabic words have been crossing over to English?
The lending has not ceased. On the contrary, it has gained momentum in the last few decades. Geopolitical events, the media all over the world and even cultural exchange have made Arabic words to be spoken in regular English, particularly in the fields of politics, food and religion.
English has in full absorbed some Arabic words such as:
Jihad – ubiquitous in the political and news reporting, but often distorted.
Halal – a subject nowadays on food products in the Western world.
Fatwa – commonly used as a term in law and religion.
Intifada – commonly applied to mean resistance movements.
Wadi — geographical and environmental writing.
Shawarma, hummus, falafel – these do not even require translation anymore.
The Merriam Webster dictionary, as well as the Oxford dictionary, have recently included a lot of Arabic-origin words. It is not merely the issue of influence of culture, but it is also that Arabic even has words to describe objects that English simply has no clean equivalent to.
Also read about: how many rules of meem saakin are there
Surprising Facts about the Arabic Language
Some of the aspects of Arabic that may surprise people are:
There are 11 words in Arabic that can be used to describe love; each word has its own stage or shade of love.
It possesses a grammatical dual form of nouns, pronouns and verbs – which English lacks altogether.
Classical Arabic of the Quran has remained extremely stable during the last 1,400 years, and is thus one of the most stable written languages of all time.
Arabic is written on the right hand side and each letter is shaped differently according to its position in a word.
It is one of the six languages used as official in the United Nations.
The magazine derives its name out of Arabic, makhazin which means storehouses.
The origin of algebra is the name, coined by the 9th-century mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, of al-jabr.
Conclusion
Arabic is not a language, it is a civilization made out of words. When they want to know how many words Arabic contains, they mean how deep a culture that has taken fifteen hundred years to fine-tune its language about the world is. Arabic has a lexical potential that leaves most other languages far behind with between 12 and 18 million words in its classical and modern varieties. Its root based system, its continuous literary tradition, its sacred relationship with the Quran have contributed to what it is.
Be it to study the Arabic language, you are simply interested in language or find yourself in the position of a translator, it is quite an eye-opener to get a sense of the size of this lexicon. And with the rate at which the Arabic words continue to make their way into the English and other languages, it is evident that there is still much that can be offered by this ancient language to the contemporary world.
FAQs
What are some common Arabic words and phrases?
Common Arabic expressions are such as Marhaba (hello), Shukran (thank you) and Maa salama (goodbye) and Inshallah (God willing) and Yalla (let go). You will hear them throughout the Arab world.
Which language has 500,000 words?
English has a vocabulary of about 500,000 to 600,000 words by the dictionary of the English language, ranking it as one of the largest English language vocabularies in the present day.
What is the language with the most words?
Arabic is usually regarded as the victor here, and the range of words, 12 to 18 million, is indeed enormous compared with English when the complete classical tradition is included.